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Monday, October 6, 2014

Guy Cote - What If?

Every good story begins with a “What if?” For St. Petersburg
writer Guy Cote, this question was the beginning of a journey that took him
from the misty legends of history to the outer limits of science and
technology.

Cote’s interest in writing stemmed from his lifelong love of
cinema. “I liked to emulate fictional movie characters,” he explains.
“Eventually I got tired of living vicariously through other people’s
characters, so I decided to write my own screenplays.” He completed his first
script before graduating from the University of Maine, and in 1991, he headed
to Florida to see if he could sell it. In the interim, he completed six more
screenplays, studied film production at California State University, took an intensive
screenwriting course at the International Film and Television Workshop, and
earned a Master’s degree in history from the University of South Florida. “I’m
a huge history buff,” he says. “If ever there was a person in need of a time
machine, it would be me.”

Cote took a job as a history teacher, but in the back of his
mind, he knew that someday he would write a novel. Six years ago, he decided to
give it a try. “I’ve always wondered how famous historical figures would view
and interact in today’s world,” he says. He had long been a fan of Charlemagne,
the first Holy Roman Emperor who once ruled all of Europe, so he asked himself,
“What if Charlemagne was around today?” He began to do research and unearthed
some puzzling details that drove his story. Cote spent one year plotting the story’s
timeline and three years doing the actual writing. The end result: Long Live the King, the first
installment in what Cote hopes to be a series called “The Charlemagne Saga.”

Long Live the King
is the story of Josie Ersman, a young woman who leaves her highly dysfunctional
life in America to go to Germany to meet a grandfather she never knew. Once in
Germany, she accepts a job working for her grandfather’s employer: an
organization that has been trying since Nazi times to reunify Europe as the
great medieval emperor Charlemagne (aka Charles the Great) once had. According
to Cote, “The organization our heroine works for is actually a real-life society
founded by a former Nazi with the stated goal of reunifying all the countries
of Europe into one super nation.” But in Long
Live the King, Cote goes one step further. As the nemesis of the story
tells Josie, “We cannot truly enjoy the peace, unity and prosperity of Charles
the Great’s empire without the Emperor himself. That is why we are going to
clone Charlemagne, and we want you to give birth to his clone.”

From there, the story takes off on a multi-national,
cross-continental adventure that is more than Josie could imagine and almost
more than she can handle. Cote wanted his heroine to be unconventional. “I was
tired of the standard adventure characters,” he says. “I wanted to throw someone with no sense of
adventure into a situation that was completely foreign to her.” Cote also enjoyed
the challenge of creating a female protagonist. “The story dictated that the
main character had to be a woman since it involves a pregnancy,” he says, “but
it wasn’t easy knowing how a woman would feel.” So he bought books on
pregnancy, watched online videos, asked for help from female friends, and after
his marriage, enlisted advice from his wife. The result, according to Cote, is “a book that
weaves together all my passions: history, suspense, action, adventure, travel,
politics and religion” and views them all from a female perspective.

The sequel to Long
Live the King is currently in the “plotting stage,” but Cote had to put the
Charlemagne Saga on hold to novelize a screenplay he wrote entitled “Tried and
True” and complete another thriller entitled The Hottest Place in Hell. Cote’s filmmaking partners are currently
raising the financing for the “Tried and True” film and The Hottest Place in Hell is making the publishing rounds with
industry professionals in New York. Cote intends to begin writing the second
installment in the Charlemagne Saga by the beginning of 2015. While his writing
requires a substantial commitment, Cote wouldn’t have it any other way. “The
most difficult thing about writing is that it’s such a solitary endeavor,” he
says, “but that’s also what I enjoy the most. It’s a form of escapism that allows
me to create a world and run around in it. And when I’m finished, I hope
readers will wonder, ‘What if that really happened?’”

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About Me

I'm currently a columnist for The Island Reporter, a publication serving the South Gulf Beaches in St. Petersburg, Florida. My Florida Authors series features articles based on exclusive interviews with some of the state’s best writers. My “Pride & Joy” column
profiles individuals who give back to their communities through volunteerism.
I'm also the author of two novels."Project June Bug" is the story of a young teacher’s efforts to help a student with ADHD. It has received 12 awards, including Premier Book Awards “2009 Book of the Year.” My latest novel, "Jacqueline,"(published by Anaiah Press) is a middle grade historical based on an experience my dad, a WWII veteran, had while stationed in France shortly after D-day. Four of my stories have appeared in "Chicken Soup for the Soul" editions.
I live on Treasure Island (yes, it's as beautiful as it sounds), with my husband and two rather noisy macaws. In my spare time, I enjoy reading, walking on the beach, and visiting family in New Jersey, where I'm the proud "Grammy" of six beautiful grandchildren (with the pictures to prove it!)